Well if you or anyone in your neice's family have some tech experience with phone roms then i would suggest Redmi Note series. They have best hardware for their price. Their problem is that MIUI is absolute trash on arrival with bloatware and adware but it can simply be removed with the help of a laptop/computer. Furthermore, Redmi Note series have abundance of good custom roms available on XDA, so MIUI can simply be removed and a custom clean rom be installed with google camera api which makes the camera as good as pixel phones.